3 The Domain Name System; Dns Terminology - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION Installation Manual

The Domain Name System
DNS (domain name system) is needed to resolve the domain names and hostnames into
IP addresses. In this way, the IP address 192.168.0.1 is assigned to the hostname earth,
for example. Before setting up your own name server, read the general information
about DNS in Section 30.3, "Name Resolution" (page 563). The following configuration
examples refer to BIND.

33.1 DNS Terminology

Zone
The domain name space is divided into regions called zones. For instance, if you
have example.org, you have the example section, or zone, of the org domain.
DNS server
The DNS server is a server that maintains the name and IP information for a domain.
You can have a primary DNS server for master zone, a secondary server for slave
zone, or a slave server without any zones for caching.
Master zone DNS server
The master zone includes all hosts from your network and a DNS server master
zone stores up-to-date records for all the hosts in your domain.
Slave zone DNS server
A slave zone is a copy of the master zone. The slave zone DNS server obtains
its zone data with zone transfer operations from its master server. The slave
zone DNS server responds authoritatively for the zone as long as it has valid
The Domain Name System
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